Tica went back to New York, Johnny went back to New York (without Dédée, now happily settled at Louis Perron’s, a very promising trombonist). Baby Lennox went back to New York. The season in Paris was very dull and I missed my friends. My book on Johnny was selling very well all over, and naturally Sammy Pretzal was already talking about the possibility of an adaptation for Hollywood; when you think of the relation of the franc-rate to the dollar, that’s always an interesting proposition. My wife was still furious over my passage with Baby Lennox, nothing too serious overall finally, Baby is promiscuous in a reasonably marked manner and any intelligent woman would have to understand that things like that don’t compromise the conjugal equilibrium, aside from which, Baby had already gone back to New York with Johnny, she’d decided that she’d enjoy returning on the same boat with Johnny. She’d already be shooting junk with Johnny, and lost like him, poor doll. And Amorous had just been released in Paris, just as the second edition of my book went to press and they were talking about translating it into German. I had thought a great deal about the changes possible in a second edition. To be honest within the limits permitted by the profession, I wondered whether it would not be necessary to show the personality of my subject in another light. I discussed it at different times with Delaunay and with Hodeir, they didn’t really know what to advise me because they thought the book terrific and realized that the public liked it the way it was. It seemed I was being warned that they were both afraid of a literary infection, that I would end up by riddling the work with nuances which would have little or nothing to do with Johnny’s music, at least as all of us understood it. It appeared to me that the opinion of people in authority (and my own personal decision, it would be dumb to negate that at this level of consideration) justified putting the second edition to bed as was. A close reading of the trade magazines from the States (four stories on Johnny, news of a new suicide attempt, this time with tincture of iodine, stomach pump and three weeks in the hospital, working in Baltimore again as though nothing had happened) calmed me sufficiently, aside from the anguish I felt at these ghastly backslidings. Johnny had not said one compromising word about the book. Example (in Stomping Around, a music magazine out of Chicago, Teddy Rogers’ interview with Johnny): “Have you read what Bruno V—– in Paris wrote about you?” “Yes, it’s very good.” “Nothing to say about the book?” “Nothing, except that it’s fine. Bruno’s a great guy.” It remained to be seen what Johnny might say if he were walking around drunk or high, but at least there were no rumors of the slightest contradiction from him. I decided not to touch the second edition, to go on putting Johnny forth as he was at bottom: a poor sonofabitch with barely mediocre intelligence, endowed like so many musicians, so many chess players and poets, with the gift of creating incredible things without the slightest consciousness (at most, the pride of a boxer who knows how strong he is) of the dimensions of his work. Everything convinced me to keep, no matter what, this portrait of Johnny; it wasn’t worth it to create complications with an audience that was crazy about jazz but cared nothing for either musical or psychological analysis, nothing that wasn’t instant satisfaction and clear-cut besides, hands clapping to keep the beat, faces gone beatific and relaxed, the music that was driving through the skin, seeping into the blood and breath, and then finish, to hell with profound motives.

First two telegrams came (one to Delauney, one to me, in the afternoon the newspapers came out with their idiotic comments); twenty days later I had a letter from Baby Lennox, who had not forgotten me. “They treated him wonderfully at Bellevue and I went to fetch him when he got out. We were living in Mike Russolo’s apartment, he’s gone on tour to Norway. Johnny was in very good shape, and even though he didn’t want to play dates, he agreed to record with the boys at Club 28. You I can tell this, really he was pretty weak”—I can imagine what Baby meant by that after our affair in Paris—“and at night he scared me, the way he’d breathe and moan. The only thing that softens it for me,” Baby summed it up beautifully, “is that he died happy and without knowing it was coming. He was watching TV and all of a sudden slumped to the floor. They told me it was instantaneous.” From which one inferred that Baby had not been present, and the assumption was correct because later we found out that Johnny was living at Tica’s place and that he’d been there with her for five days, depressed and preoccupied, talking about quitting jazz, going to live in Mexico and work in the fields (he’d handed that to everybody at some time or other in his life, it’s almost boring), and that Tica was taking care of him and doing everything possible to keep him quiet, making him think of the future (this is what Tica said later, as if she or Johnny had ever had the slightest idea of the future). In the middle of a television program which Johnny was enjoying, he started to cough, all at once he slumped down all of a sudden, etc. I’m not all that sure that death was as instantaneous as Tica declared to the police (Johnny’s death in her apartment had put her in an unusually tight spot she was trying to get out of, pot was always within reach, and probably a stash of heroin somewhere, poor Tica’d had several other bad scenes there, and the not completely convincing results of the autopsy. One can imagine completely what a doctor would find in Johnny’s lungs and liver). “You wouldn’t want to know how painful his death is to me, although I could tell you some other things,” sweet Baby added gently, “but sometime when I feel better I’ll write you or tell you (it looks like Rogers wants to get me contracts in Paris and Berlin) everything you need to know, you were Johnny’s best friend.” And after a page dedicated to insulting Tica, you’d believe she not only caused Johnny’s death but was responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Black Plague, poor Baby ended up: “Before I forget, one day in Bellevue he asked after you a lot, he was mixed up and thought you were in New York and didn’t want to come see him, he was talking all the time about fields full of things, and after he was calling for you, even cussing you out, poor baby. You know what a fever’s like. Tica told Bob Carey that Johnny’s last words were something like: ‘Oh, make me a mask,’ but you can imagine how at that moment …” I sure could imagine it. “He’d gotten very fat,” Baby added at the end of her letter, “and panted out of breath when he walked.” These were details you might expect from a person as scrupulous as Baby Lennox.

All this happened at the same time that the second edition of my book was published, but luckily I had time to incorporate an obituary note edited under full steam and inserted, along with a newsphoto of the funeral in which many famous jazzmen were identifiable. In that format the biography remained, so to speak, intact and finished. Perhaps it’s not right that I say this, but naturally I was speaking from a merely aesthetic point of view. They’re already talking of a new translation, into Swedish or Norwegian, I think. My wife is delighted at the news.